Month: May 2017

There is a serious vulnerability in sudo command that grants root access to anyone with a shell account. It works on SELinux enabled systems such as CentOS/RHEL and others too. A local user with privileges to execute commands via sudo could use this flaw to escalate their privileges to root. Patch your system as soon as possible.

The Libreboot T400 is certified by the Free Software Foundation, under their Respects Your Freedom hardware certification program. It is now available at a reduced price without any binary blobs or backdoors in BIOS. The Libreboot T400 comes without the Intel Management Engine.

Alpine Linux version 3.6 has been released. Alpine Linux is built around musl libc and busybox. This makes it smaller and more resource efficient than traditional GNU/Linux distributions. A container requires no more than 8 MB, and a minimal installation to disk requires around 130 MB of storage. Not only do you get a fully-fledged Linux environment but a large selection of packages from the repository. Alpine Linux was designed with security in mind. The kernel is patched with an unofficial port of grsecurity/PaX, and all userland binaries are compiled as Position Independent Executables (PIE) with stack smashing protection. These proactive security features prevent exploitation of entire classes of zero-day and other vulnerabilities.

Intel announced Euclid development kit for robotics. It is Ubuntu Linux 16.04 based system. One can run, monitor and manage their robotics apps with the web interface. The software works with any ROS-based (Robotics Operating System) robot such as Arduino to build sensing capabilities in your project. You can use sensors and cameras to control a robot.

The httpd server is a web server with FastCGI and TLS support. The relayd is a free and open source load-balancer and web-proxy server. One can use httpd and relayd to run a static website, blog, a PHP base application and so on using OpenBSD, FreeBSD, TrueOS, and HardenedBSD operating system. The book “Relayd and Httpd Mastery” talks about web server, distribute traffic between backends, running dynamic web sites, php based web apps, securing and optimizing web server, LibreSSL based modern cryptography library, TLS/SSL support and load-balancing your web traffic across multiple servers.